"One of my own pet hypotheses is that human life becomes literally more valuable to the living as we become wealthier and longer-lived. Wealthier lives have, other things equal, a better experiential texture. And as life expectancy increases, early death steals more years."

Pet hypothesis is right. One of the notable features of the decline in crime is how puzzling it is. A list of around 2 dozen possible causes, for instance, is given by Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer (28 April); he also notes the counter-theoretic of a continued drop in crime despite a recession and cuts to policing. Criminologists mostly admit to being at a loss.

Regarding the above theory: wealth is flat over some large sectors of society, since the 1% have famously vacuumed up all the gains over the last few decades, but crime is dropping everywhere, even amongst the sizeable tranche of ex-blue collar Americans and others with only high school or less who are moving backwards in real terms.

In addition, it is also hard to credit marginal gains in life expectancy, progressing probably at something like an increase of 6 months per decade, on the behaviour of criminal males in the 18-25 bracket; it is hard to imagine that they are thinking about life at 75 versus 80.

Having said all that, if you insist on pet theories, a better one is lead:

The final sentence is distortive. I don't own a gun in order to defend myself against other gun owners. Gun ownership is protection against those (armed or unarmed) who dare threaten the lives and/or property of other people. Also, and less accepted, as a means to defend oneself against foreign and one's own government. Relying entirely on someone or something else for your own protection is not the safest protection.

Whether a gun is needed for self protection depends very much on where you live or work. A store owner in some US city neighborhoods is probably wise to have gun. A store owner in Paris who has a gun for self protection would be considered delusional. Where I live (a Long Island suburb) most store owners do not have guns and neither do most residents. No one feels the need for one.

"So if crime is on the decrease overall do those who own guns as a defense against crime need to revise their need for a gun?"
They might choose to re-evaluate. Which is their right and their choice (not a "need"). On the flip side, some people might view the decreasing crime trends and attribute that to the ever-increasing number of private firearms in circulation, and decide that it is prudent to have a firearm as a form of self-insurance.
The idea that if crime rates go down, the 2nd Amendment somehow loses its status as a constitutional right is silly. If the police evolve to the point that no one is ever interrogated against their will or subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures, does that mean that the 4th and 5th amendments somehow lose their vitality? If the government evolves to the point that it tolerates every kind of speech imaginable, does that mean that we no longer need that protection in the 1st amendment?

That would fall on the gun-owner's individual subjective valuation of continuing his or her ownership of the firearm. He or she is not forever its owner should they choose not to be. If this person feels safe enough to unload the gun (sell it) because crime is down - so be it People should be free to decide whether they wish to own firearms. That decision should not be taken away by others who subjectively feel that others should not own something. That is coercion. That is un-American, that is un-Anglo-Saxon.

I do not argue that you have a brain. But your brain will not do you much good when an intruder or someone intending harm to you, your family, your property is not using theirs especially if they are armed, be it gun, knife, blunt object, etc. In that rare but extremely plausible situation a brain in the intellectual, civilized, progressive thinking sense as you implied falls short in defending your person compared to a firearm. The police will not be able to help immediately, rather only after the event.

First of all, I don't know where you got "progressive" or what it means in that sentence but the rest of what you say is completely falsifiable. In my life, I have
- Had a gun pulled on me from behind in an alley in Atlanta
- Been stuck in the middle back seat of a car driven by Australian Aborigines on an armed crime spree across western New South Wales, with a criminal on either side of me
- Been in a fistfight with a gun smuggler 50 pounds heavier than I was then who had a pistol in his waistband
- Been threatened by guatemalan rebels on the side of a volcano with trigger-happy government shoots armed with a tank trying to get on a bead on the party
- Been forced off a bus by a detachment of the Peruvian Guardia Civil in central Peru during the war with the sendero luminoso.

In some of these cases I was armed, in some I wasn't but in all of these cases I was either outnumbered or my antagonist completely had the drop on me. In all of these cases, had I or Ty Sackett reached for a weapon, we would have been relying on the disposition or poor aim of the other for survival. Thinking it through is why it was in my control. In not one of these cases did I give up any property, money or dignity. In the Atlanta case and the central Peruvian case, I received an apology from the perpetrator or soldier as appropriate.

I'm perfectly happy that we have the 2nd amendment and I sure don't deny that we do have it. But anyone who thinks a gun is a better insurance policy than keeping your courage and wits is every bit as naive as someone who thinks an assault weapons ban or a background check would have prevented Sandy Hook. In your home invasion scenario, what happens if I try to think through the problem depends on who is invading. That's also the case if I try to shoot it out.

When I visit the United States I am invariably struck by the violent solutions offered by thoughtful people, people from all segments of U.S. society with a variety of educational backgrounds. Someday sit down with a note pad and flick through the US television channels and make note of the blood and mayhem depicted in each show. I recently watched part of episodes in four programs where the 'detectives' or 'officers' nearly kicked to death the people in their charge to obtain information from them...... do I hear water boarding? Of course this is not exclusive to the US, but it does contravene the image that nation tries very hard to project.
I think the love affair the US has with killing tools is a cultural problem (flaw)which needs to be addressed at a cultural level.
The added problem to this violence as depicted so often in US films and television is the export of this violence. The entertainment industry in the US is so effective at selling its products abroad it is also selling its violent solutions.
I have selected the US as an example only because it is, at present, the bully of the Western World, and it has the cultural-political gravitas to have influence. Heaven only knows the same could have been said of the Romans. It is discouraging newer cultures miss their opportunity to make real, dramatic changes in cultural thinking.

Oh, please. Meanwhile the world cries for American intervention in places like Syria, Libya and Iran. The world is not without its own darn hypocrisy. Did you read the article? Honestly, it's nothing new to those of us who already knew gun violence has been on the decline for decades while violent crimes are higher in places like the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, Canada - my home country. You have no basis for your assertion. In fact, the entire premise of the Obama administration for tighter control was specious to begin with and emotionally driven in response to an event statistically known to be tiny. They lost and deservedly so. Perhaps Obama can go and figure out why his hometown of Chicago has high murder rates despite among the tightest controls in the land.

Actually, violent crime in the UK is massively down. And guns have been all but outlawed.

America really does have severe cultural issues that glorify violence and guns. Every american show I've watched recently features guns in some capacity or another. It's cultural obsession that has come to be ingrained in the american id as a solution to all problems.

"It's cultural obsession that has come to be ingrained in the american id as a solution to all problems."

Yes, every American views firearms as a solution to all of my problems. You know Americans all to well, far more than an American knows their fellow Americans. Since you are so correct in your suggestion that we use firearms/violence to solve all of our problems, I have compiled a list of problems I sometimes face, and you can the solution I came up with always involves violence:

When I am hungry, I shoot the refrigerator with a shotgun until an apple rolls out or some meat falls on the floor. I have food now, violence has solved my problem.

The other day I was driving my vehicle and my fuel light came on. I shot that too as a warning to my check engine light not to display unsettling information. I have noticed my air conditioning has been working particularly hard after that demonstration of force.

Just last week I was at a bar, and ran out of cigarettes...Shit! What am I gonna do? That's right. I'm American. I pull through in these situations. So I patriotically hacked off someone's arm that was holding a cigarette, and took the last few puffs on it much to my relief. The guy didn't even mind, he knew I was jonesing for a smoke really badly.

I could go on like this, but I don't want to get dragged into a debate about what I plan on doing with all of the heads I have amassed in my freezer. (FYI, I really hate when the mailman brings me bills!)

Hm, maybe. It's unquestionably a big and troubling part of our media. But ultimately, there's just no evidence that greater violence in movies, television, or video games leads to greater violence in society. Our entertainment get more and more gory, and yet our crime rates fall. Imaginary violence might be distasteful to some sensibilities, but it's not a problem that need fixing.

What does it say about a society where the government can require the People to use transportation that lacks the safety features that they would otherwise have? You don't think requiring cars with higher MPG comes for free, do you?

We have a right to guns in the sense that the government can't take them away. Like the other rights established in our Constitution, it is a negative right. We've only attempted to give people positive rights to various things via legislation since the '30s, and with mixed results. A "right to a gun" analogous to recent attempts to grant people a “right to health care” would be something like a right that the federal government will provide everyone with a certain gun and quantity of ammunition periodically for free. This doesn't "say anything about society", it's just an inapt comparison.

If you're referring to size of vehicle, requiring all vehicles to have higher MPG improves safety as vehicles will tend to be lighter and smaller. No-one is safer if everyone is driving a 4-ton monstrosity. Euro safety standards are typically far better than US ones anyway.

It could be anything. The most obvious is that one could use heavier and sturdier materials in a vehicle such as steel vs aluminum or plastic.

Engineering is a set of tradeoffs. When the government mandates one of those tradeoffs to be MPG, the common approach to improve MPG is to reduce the weight of the vehicle by using lighter materials. This tradeoff is being determined to what what is in the interest of the consumer regarding other vehicle features. One of those features is safety.

Supposing that nothing is being prohibited, the government is driving the consumer into vehicles that emphasize MPG over whatever else.

Ryan, the government granted the right to gun when it involved flintlocks and muskets. Judging by the incident in Conn. looks like the electorate has allowed muskets to be upgraded to assains tools in just many states.

Access to a doctor until Obama care kicks in is only available to those in American society that can afford it.

The priorities in the US are pretty unique for an advanced civilization and frankly pretty perverse logic by many nations standards.

Your word choice demonstrates your confusion on this issue. The government did not and does not grant Americans our right to bear arms. Rather, as a condition to accepting governance under the Constitution, the People required that the document explicitly prohibit the government from infringing on our already existing right to bear arms. Just like our rights to free speech, to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure, etc., the second amendment is a limit on what the government may do. It has never been up to the government, or any electorate, to change this, but only up to the People speaking through the amendment process set forth in Article V. If the government is going to provide people with healthcare, fine. But this requires affirmative steps to be taken. Medical care is not and will never be a "right" in the sense that no one has it until his fellow citizens are somehow motivated or compelled to provide it. Someone has to collect taxes and pay doctors to make this happen. It will never be any more of a "right" than any other entitlement. They are all just claims against taxpayers, and they are limited by what the taxpayers and the government can and will provide. Sooner or later, the government will not be able to provide what it has promised, and what people feel they have a “right” to, under social security, medicare and obamacare, and so it will provide less. This is a budgetary certainty, acknowledged by our sitting Treasury Secretary. The details have yet to be determined, but the government will provide less. What kind of a right is that? Don't confuse this kind of legislated government benefit with our fundamental rights under the Constitution. The People’s rights to freedom of speech, to bear arms, etc., existed before and exist apart from the government. They are not dependent on the will or resources of the taxpayers or the government, and that is the kind of right that you can believe in.

Ryan,
The point to be made is all about the current mindset of the US. It has an inability to deal with a moral dilemma due to a philosophical debate on how to change the status quo and break the current political and legal morass.

Debating issues in the weeds like positive and negative constitutional rights ironically is that type of tangential dialogue that can actually lead to rationalizing one wrong with another wrong and the outcome being positive.

As it sits right now, the US is locked in a Darwinian mindset where those with the biggest guns permitted by law who win a shoot out sanctioned by some states like Florida and only those wounded intentionally or unintentionally with the best health insurance policy survives both physically and financially.

If there is a will on the part of the electorate to change the status quo, then by all means change it. However, don’t kid yourself that America doesn’t have a very unique and negative image problem.

Ryan,
The point to be made is all about the current mindset of the US. It has an inability to deal with a moral dilemma due to a philosophical debate on how to change the status quo and break the current political and legal morass.

Debating issues in the weeds like positive and negative constitutional rights ironically is that type of tangential dialogue that can actually lead to rationalizing one wrong with another wrong and the outcome being positive.

As it sits right now, the US is locked in a Darwinian mindset where those with the biggest guns permitted by law who win a shoot out sanctioned by some states like Florida and only those wounded intentionally or unintentionally with the best health insurance policy survives both physically and financially.

If there is a will on the part of the electorate to change the status quo, then by all means change it. However, don’t kid yourself that America doesn’t have a very unique and negative image problem.

I wholeheartedly disagree. My experience and my study of law and history have lead me steadily to understand that the maintenance of the rule of law in accordance with our Constitution, including defending the framework of a federal government of limited authority, is not tangential or merely philosophical, but absolutely central to our collective well being. The outcome of any particular policy question, be it gun control, subsidized healthcare, or any other matter is of secondary importance to arriving at the outcome in accordance with the Constitution. Gun rights are the same in this respect as our right to free speech or to due process of law. Regardless of any policy argument, I will never support legislative restrictions on our clearly stated constitutional right to bear arms. This can only be accomplished by the People via the rigor of a constitutional amndment. In exactly the same manner, no matter how deplorable their message, I will not accept a legislative bar on the rights of the KKK, the Westboro Baptists, etc., to free speech. In the same manner, I will not support the punishment of a criminal, no matter how heinous or apparent his guilt, who has not been convicted via the due process of law. Even though I have never owned a gun, deplore the message of the KKK, and am fairly confident that I will never be accused of a serious crime, I know that the day a legislature can overcome the rights of the gun owner, the outspoken minority, or the accused will be the day that a legislature can overcome all of the freedoms that I hold dear. I've put gun owners in a pretty unsavory crowd in the prior couple of sentences. This isn't to suggest that I merely tolerate gun owners' rights, which I also generally support on policy grounds, but to explain why others opposed to gun owners' rights on policy grounds should nonetheless support them in the interest of our mutual liberty.

Just because gun violence has dropped from an alarming peak it does not mean it is at an "acceptable" level. All the stats don't mean a thing for a parent who has lost a child. It's just background noise. Ask any Sandy Hook parent. America should compare itself with other nations with little gun violence, not with its own sad past.

Public Dude, "own sad past?" Does Europe have a "sad past?" The decline has been steady. Seems to me America's problem was one of enforcing what was already on the books. Personally, I admit, I'm not all that impressed by the progressive Europe/Canada angle. Just my take. There's a lot of misconception with American life and lot of it is rooted in the fact the rest of the world - including Canada - simply doesn't quite grasp the notion of LIBERTY. No nation on the planet debates this ideal more than America.

To me, in europe, liberty is:
Being able to send my kids to school without worrying about them being massacred.

To walk through streets at night blind drunk with no fear of crime.

To know if I see a policeman they can't pull a gun on me.

It's freedom to live life without fear. We compromise by none of us having firearms. We don't need them. The government overthrow argument is invalid too. Look at the arab spring, most of those were bloodless revolutions. You don't need guns to overthrow tyrants.

Projectiles are for pansies. Real hunters jump out of trees with clubs or knives. When Teddy went hunting in Africa and South America to fill New York and Washington with specimens, he mostly used his fists and teeth.

Why most politicians and common Americans are opposing gun control?Simple answer is psyche of Americans based on fear for protect our life gun is essential to every one.When in gun firing many innocent small children murdered in New Town immediately sale of guns increased all over America.That show how much deeply fear inserted in mind of Americans

I think common Americans are really split now when it comes to gun control.
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A clear majority (over 50% and higher) used to be for gun control of some type, theoretically. Now that came down over the past decade.
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See Pew Research data points: http://www.people-press.org/2013/03/12/gun-rights-vs-gun-control/#total
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Otherwise, despite this blog, about everyone with half a brain and who has been around the block since the mid-1980s realizes that security in neighborhoods have gotten better in general in most places.

I think Americans must change the some causes of constitution which had given fundamental right to gun possessing to American citizens.That is greatest detention for control on gun.That why congress helpless to pass the bill.

Could non-fatal data equally say that we have become better with dealing with gun wounds? That would be a lot of change to explain but maybe there's a story of innovation generated by Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is an issue that has bothered me for many years. Whether related to guns or vehicles or other potential killers, an "incident" gets recorded as a fatality only if the person actually dies. It could go one way or another depending on how good and how readily available the shock/trauma medical response is. People survive things today that almost surely would have not been survivable 20 or 30 years ago. So how can that factor be sorted out, for a more accurate indication of the incidents themselves?

My only complaint about the legislation flop were its implications on our democratic nature. Does a well funded and loudmouthed minority control the decisions that affected the majority of us? These stats have been widely available via the FBI reports and the Census. The steeper decline shown in the charts corresponds nicely to the implementation of the Clinton ban. So in my mind the question is about the relative difference between the declining rates. Other contributing factors could also be the legalization of abortion and the fall in prices for Crack per the authors of “Freakonomics” . However the rate of MASS Shootings ala Columbine, Aurora, and Sandy Hook is INCREASING. BUT The two problems can be viewed differently with far different solutions applied.

Before trying to fix any problems we need to know the facts and articulate exactly what the problem is that we are trying to focus on. What are the root causes and the feasible solutions?
Broad sweeping bans wile effective at the margin in reducing gun deaths at a faster rate, are likely an expensive and inefficient if impractical way to target the problem if it is defined as reducing mass shootings. It’s little “boil the ocean” and hope for the best in my opinion.
More effective solutions might be focused on the top two ways that “bad guys’ get guns (the real ways) or looking at the processes that a would be mass shooter has to go through. Solutions there may not even require a single new gun regulation. Just my thoughts.

The Clinton ban on assault weapons (that were found to rarely be used in crime as per CDC studies and FBI yearly weapons statistics) caused the drop in violent crime that began a year before the ban was put into place, and has continued long after it expired?

You claim that the occurrence of spree shootings in increasing, a fact which this article directly contradicts that claim. We're five months into 2013 and the closest thing to a spree killing that has been reported by the media thus far was when a soldier and California police officer went rogue using weapons obtained by that state's LEO exemption.

Spree shootings are so insignificant that it doesn't matter if they're declining - which they are. Thaynie, that's too logical what you said. Obamacare is another monstrosity that will do little that it claims it will and a huge cost. 3000 pages to cover 15 million people. Once again, the disease of 'one size fits all' prevailed. It had to be passed "to know what's in it" apparently. I never heard something so stupid in my life. Who would live their lives based on such mutterings?

There are distinct types of gun violence in the US. One is gang related activity, usually that results in deaths of gang members and innocents caught in the cross fire. This has declined since the 90's and the reason is not entirely clear, some may be better policing, some change in demographics. Nevertheless, it would be much lower if access to guns was difficult. Most of the guns used in these cases are obtained without any background check whatsoever, either stolen or purchased from individuals who did obtain them legally. Other important source of gun violence is domestic violence, with one spouse (usually the husband) killing the other. Not clear background checks will do much to decrease that since the purchaser probably will not be considered a threat until he becomes one. Finally, there are the massacres that gather the most headlines and are usually committed by deranged individuals. Background checks could have an impact on those but only if the checks are thorough and involve not just the purchaser but those who could have access to those guns because they are related to the purchaser. After all the Newton massacre was committed by the deranged son of someone who would have passed any background check. The simple fact is that the most effective way to address all sources of gun deaths is to make access to guns or at least their casual use difficult. That is the norm in countries were death by gun fire is a fraction of what is observed in the US.

Maybe it is our increased valuation of life that's responsible for the downward trend. I submit, though, that it's more likely Prozac and its peers, which, coincidentally, hit the market at roughly the aforementioned peak in gun violence in the United States?

I'm not sure I buy the economic argument. Recessions and growing income inequality seem to have no effect on violence. The abortion legalization and lead abatement theories seem the most plausible to me. Anecdotally, I see a huge change in culture over a very short period of time. Maybe the abortions and lead abatement changed the culture or maybe the culture is an independent variable but the degree and suddenness of the change reminds me of trends in music. There doesn't seem to be any particular reason why music tastes change. This may be more than just an analogy. In the early 90's, gangsta rap and death metal were popular. Did that have an effect?

As for why parents are bubble-wrapping kids these days, I think in 10,000 years our descendants would give an evolutionary answer. Maybe the question should be: Why weren't we more protective of children in the past? Maybe we lacked the resources. Maybe having fewer children elicits a stronger protective urge. Also, I don't know if it's more a cause or a symptom but the over-protectiveness seems linked to the breakdown of neighborhood cohesion. We don't trust our neighbors anymore because we don't know them anymore.

Why weren't people more protective of children in the past? I remember studying personal risk assessment in graduate school, and asking myself the same question.

I think it comes down to the availability of information on risk and the way people decide risk based on availability heuristics. If you look at the average family ca. 1950, the level of information available on various risks like kidnapping, death from lack of bicycle helmet, or whatever was very low. If you don't think that kidnappings happen often, then you naturally won't factor into your treatment of your child.

Fast forwarding a few years, we're now drenched in information. The higher media saturation becomes, the more people start to hear about these incidents and the more they start to factor them into their calculation of risk - hence, being escorted to school, forcing kids to wear helmets and kneepads, etc.

Now that we're in an age where information availability is almost at saturation, the way news is reported sometimes influences availability heuristics to produce perverse risk assessments. I think, for example, that over-reporting of mass gun violence makes people systematically overestimate the risk of violent death from a crazy rampage, while underreporting of gang violence or the like causes people to discount it. Ditto kidnappings, chemical contamination or nuclear power accidents, both of which get plastered all over the news when it happens while many higher risk but lower story-value incidents get ignored.

Whether an issue rises up the national (international) agenda or not depends not just on the absolute rate/importance of that issue, but also on the its importance *relative* to other important issues of the day.
So the simple answer is that even though the risk of dying by gun violence has fallen, it has not fallen as far or as fast as many of the risks that previously would have outranked it - e.g. death by disease, automobile accident, war, fire. As such, it continues to rise up people's list of "things to worry about" even as the absolute level of risk falls.

and if you look at the scales presented in TFA you can see that violent acts fell more than gun related homicide which means that if an act of violence gets committed it is more likely than before that somebody gets deadly shot.

As Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner showed in their excellent book 'Freakonomics', the overall drop in crime rates may be attributed to Roe v. Wade and a generation of villains never being born. Maybe what is needed is more birth control, not more gun control?

Here is what is right...when deaths due to guns is 50% less than it was in the 70's the last thing you want to do is change anything. The slope of the curve is negative. If you do anything to change the current trajectory, it might turn positive again or stop going down so much. If it ain't broke,don't fix it.

It hasn't been decreasing as much as it did in the 90s but it's not "flat," it's been seeing decreases every year while the population of the US increases by millions annually (which means decreasing rates.)

Looking at the yearly firearms homicide figures provided by the FBI's Uniform Crime Report there is still a definite downward trend. The UCR was first compiled in 1995 where it reported 16,305 firearms homicides out of a population of 262,764,948. The latest available detailed UCR (2011) reported 8,583 firearms homicides out of a population of 311,591,917. Full data isn't yet up for 2012 but the 6-month preliminary reports yet another decrease.

Check the graph, it's in rates per 100,000 people, so population is already factored in. In the last decade of the data set we've seen a low of 3.8 firearms related homicies per 100k, subsequent rise, and then drop back to 3.6. During that time total crime has still trended down.

Again, it's great news that we've seen such a drop, but I'm not satisfied with the current level/pace.

The latest homicide rate data in that chart is two and half years old and it comes from the CDC's WISQARS mortality database.

WISQARS is a useful statistical tool but they study mortality via death certificates, and they lump any deaths like involuntary manslaughter in with homicides (which is also why WISQARS reports only a statistical handful of accidental gunshot fatalities.) The difference is that one is a fatal accident caused by negligence, and the other is killing with forethought and malice and it's enough of a difference that the FBI separates the former from the latter.

On the other hand from what I've read about how the CDC compiles stats their metric for "homicide" is much broader in that any death that someone is held responsible for is counted as murder even if it was an accident, while accidents only seem to be considered as such if it was self-inflicted but not ruled suicide.

If you look at the FBI UCR where they create VERY specific divisions for crimes you see they only count crimes of malice like homicide and voluntary manslaughter as "murder" and as a result they show lower rates. WISQARS reports 11,078 murders in which a gun was the weapon used in 2010 while the UCR reported 8,775 the same year using the same data.

If the FBI (which has far more recent and detailed crime reporting than WISQARS) is correct then the most recent firearms homicide rate is more like 2.7, or 0.0027% of the total population annually.

Is the author of this article suggesting that there has been significant human evolution in the last twenty or so years enough so that during that space of time we have now come to value life significantly more ? Indeed the reasons why gun crime has significantly reduced are complex, but I am not inclined to believe we really have evolved in just to decades to make that a significant factor.

Sir, how dare you insert facts in an emotionally governed arena of legislation!

In all seriousness, I think the decrease in violent crime probably has a lot of causes. I think a possible linke is that the electronic age has caused younger people to be inside more. Playing World of Warcraft and surfing Facebook doesn't leave a lot of time for shenanigans outside.

"Once we understand how much safer we have really become, the felt need to own a gun in order to defend against guns ought to recede. Right?"

No, it won't. Those who own a gun for self-defense view it as an insurance policy. Thus what's relevant to them is the worst-case scenario (think the Cheshire home invasion), not whether the average expected payout exceeds the premium.

A great many people who own guns do so for recreation on top of self-defense; the tens if not _hundreds_ of millions of hunters and 3-gun competitors and people who just like plinking cans at the range do not do those things because they're afraid of crime.

It amazes me how people outside of gun culture consistently misanalyse it (and the politics involved) and then wonder why they end up being proven wrong.

I've read Pinker's book, and I am convinced that violence has declined tremendously over the course of human history, including in America. However, this blog fails to make the relative comparisons that Pinker does. The incidence of violence is still higher in America than in other western nations, and the decline in violence has taken place later. And though the factors that account for the great majority of violence are waning, there always be the occasional crazy-angry person like Lanza.

The fact is, the decline in violence stems from deeper causes than attitudes towards guns. As the blog says, perhaps the desire for guns will wane along with the sense of threat.

silty, I thought this too. I wouldn't mind a citation because mine shows just the opposite. Rates (knife attacks, rape, assault etc.) are higher in places, as I mentioned above, in the UK, Australia, Canada, Italy, Germany and France. An anecdote; I have clients from France - each tells me how violent Paris has grown and each believe it to be worse than most places in America. They claim the police force is in a state of disarray. The problem in America is the tendency to increase the police state at the expense of civil liberties. Whereas Europeans and Canadians willingly gave up their rights to the state, Americans aren't so willing. At first, I thought them to be nuts. But now that I'm older and visit this nation often, I can see they're not as crazy as I first thought. We offload way too much responsibility on the state. Way too much.

It has dropped. I can merrily wander round London, the Hague, Amsterdam, most european cities happily smashed without the slightest concern for my well-being. Something I wouldn't even consider in 90% of american cities.

You Sir, have no idea what you're talking about. I'd also prefer to be attacked with a knife than a gun coincidentally.